AiW Guests: Lottie McGrath, Charlie Renwick, Eloise Percy-Davis and Tilly Everard. Nii Ayikwei Parkes is an acclaimed British-Ghanaian poet, writer, and publisher. Winner of multiple international awards, Parkes’ work ranges from the reinvention of accounts of slavery with sci-fi undertones… Read More ›
Kate Haines
2013 Africa Writes #P&P – Q&A: Novelist, poet and literary scholar Mukoma wa Ngugi
AiW Note: As part of our Africa Writes #PastAndPresent weekend, in the absence of the in-person festival in 2020, this Q&A is the first in our cast back over our coverage of Africa Writes over the years, and is republished… Read More ›
Archiving Small Magazines: AWA Digitisation and Exhibition in Montpelier
AiW Guest Aurélie Journo AiW note: This Guest post is part of a series of articles publishing on Africa in Words that come out of conversations between a new interdisciplinary network of researchers and literary producers examining the circulation and production… Read More ›
Looking Back and Looking Forward: Happy New Year from AiW
Season’s greetings from the team at Africa in Words! Thanks for your readership and for another year of conversations on writing and culture from the African continent. As 2017 comes to a close, the blog is moving through some transitions…. Read More ›
Q&A: Literary scholar and novelist Elleke Boehmer on ‘Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds’
Yesterday evening marked the beginning of ‘Great Writers Inspire at Home’ – a series of workshops running over the next term at the University of Oxford which puts reading groups into dialogue with contemporary British writers, including Aminatta Forna and… Read More ›
Establishing a New Literary Prize: The Huza Press Award for Fiction
AiW Guest: Louise Umutoni As part of Writivism 2016, University of Bristol, Stellenbosch University and the Centre for African Cultural Excellence collaborated to bring together an Arts Management and Literary Entrepreneurship Workshop. This four-day workshop held in August in Kampala… Read More ›
Why is Translation Important?: Publishing African Literature Across Languages
AiW Guest: Edwige-Renée DRO As part of Writivism 2016, University of Bristol, Stellenbosch University and the Centre for African Cultural Excellence collaborated to bring together an Arts Management and Literary Entrepreneurship Workshop. This four-day workshop held in August in Kampala… Read More ›
Review: Moses Tladi UNEARTHED, South African National Gallery, 24 September 2015 – 31 March 2016
AiW Guest: Anthea Gordon To get to the South African National Art Gallery (SANG) you walk through the Company Gardens in Cape Town’s city centre. After passing baobab trees, a rose garden, and fountains in the middle of green lawns,… Read More ›
Reading Lessons: The Chronic (“New Cartographies,” March 2015)
AiW Guest: Ed Charlton. When it comes to alliances and accords, Africa is full of them. Whether it is bilateral extradition treaties, regional trade agreements, or the pan-continental constitution of the African Union, there are everywhere traces of the extranational… Read More ›
Q&A: Juwairiyya Asmal-Lee interviews Ankara Press author Amina Thula
AiW Guest: Juwairiyya Asmal-Lee Amina Thula is the author of two Ankara Press novels: The Elevator Kiss, published in December 2014, and the forthcoming Love Next Door, which will be released on 14 February 2016. She talks here about her writing,… Read More ›
Q&A: Uche Peter Umez interviews poet Efe Paul Azino
AiW Guest: Uche Peter Umez Widely regarded as one of Nigeria’s leading performance poets, Efe Paul Azino has been a headliner at many of the nation’s premier poetry venues. He is the Director of the Lagos International Poetry Festival,… Read More ›
Africa in Words’ highlights of 2015
Africa in Words has been taking a break over the holiday season, but we couldn’t resist taking a look back over the memorable year that has been 2015. Here, some of our Editors reflect on their highlights of 2015. We’d… Read More ›
A Question of Power: Ben Okri’s “Meditations on Greatness” at Africa Writes
AiW Guest Réhab Abdelghany I first saw Ben Okri in a photograph that the Africa Centre had sent me back in 2000 to accompany an interview with the first Caine Prize winner, Leila Aboulela, which I published later in Egypt. In… Read More ›
Acts of mutiny: the Caine Prize and ‘African Literature’
By AiW Guest Ranka Primorac. In London, a three-day literary festival called Africa Writes took place recently at the British Library (BL). The festival is now in its fourth year, it hosts an ever-widening stream of writers, readers and publishers,… Read More ›
Saah Millimono’s ‘Boy, Interrupted’: The Love Story from Liberia
AiW Guest Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire Today, I want to tell you a story. It is not my story. It is Saah Millimono’s story. Maybe it is actually not his story, it is the novel’s protagonist Tarnue’s story. And not just… Read More ›
The circulation of politics, art and literature in Nigeria
As part of his tour of the UK to promote his novel, Foreign Gods, Inc., journalist, academic and writer Okey Ndibe paid a visit to the University of Sussex earlier this week. As well as being interviewed by locally-based African literature… Read More ›
Africa in Words hosts Okey Ndibe
Okey Ndibe is a novelist, political commentator and essayist whose writing has been praised and championed by leading voices in African literature including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. His first novel Arrows of Rain was published in… Read More ›
Q&A: Jalada – pan-African writers’ collective
New pan-African writers’ collective Jalada formed last June and published their first anthology ‘Sketch of a Bald Woman in the Semi-Nude and Other Stories’ in January. Heralded by Binyavanga Wainaina as a new generation of writers producing exciting and original work, Jalada is already achieving significant critical… Read More ›
Roundtable on African Popular Culture and Public Space: Review
AiW Guest Rehab Abdelghany The 3rd African Popular Cultures Workshop hosted at the University of Sussex concluded with a roundtable that brought together six academics and creative writers, who research, write from and about different parts of the African continent…. Read More ›
The Exhibition and Plenary Lecture at the African Popular Cultures Workshop: Review
The second half of the African Popular Cultures Workshop at Sussex was held in a modern studio space called the ‘Creativity Zone’. Made up of three adjoining rooms, each of these exhibited different elements of work brought together under the… Read More ›